


Varied my Velocities

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Cunnilingus, Cybernetics, F/F, F/M, Vaginal Fingering, just a really long 'ghost in the machine' joe tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:35:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25639615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Project Canaan died six years ago, and Palamedes Sextus died with it, and he hasn’t stopped talking to Camilla Hect since.Coronabeth Tridentatrius, heiress and CEO of private security firm IdaSec is missing her sister, and running out of time.There are ghosts in the machine.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius, Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 62





	Varied my Velocities

**Author's Note:**

> Parties wishing to skip directly to, or to avoid the sex scenes enitrely:  
> Section VII "silently and very fast" is the Cam/Pal  
> Section XII "a green hour I can't stop" is the the Cam/Cor

> _What does a body of_
> 
> _knowledge look like? A body, any body. Look away_
> 
> _but I’m still there._
> 
> _\- Birds Hover the Trampled Fields, Richard Siken_

**I. almost every door an exit**

There was no funeral.

There was no funeral—there was barely even a body, just him, lying there, eyes open, full of static, and he was so _light_ , barely more than bone and wire, barely there at all—

But there was no funeral.

In Camilla’s dream, she is at a funeral.

The sky falls over everything like a lead balloon, heavy with a rain that never falls. The air is clotted and cold with the threat of it, clammy on the back of her neck.

She is looking down into a grave. He is standing behind her, one hand braced on her shoulder, in a black suit like no suit she has ever known him to have.

“Hm.” he murmurs, “Doesn’t look like me at all, does it?”

* * *

**II. if i fell through the floor, i would keep falling**

The insides of her eyelids are riotously hot, a yolky orange shot through with blood and sparks. Cam peels her eyes open like she’s skinning a grape, hunched in the magenta slats falling on her bed from the migrainous neon outside. She draws her knees up to her chest. She curls her hands over the back of her skull, fingers sifting through her damp hair until they catch on the one Node implanted at the back of her neck, tucked between her C1 vertebra and the occipital bone, the one nobody else knows about, the one that Cam doesn’t use. She watches the light on her sheets blue-shift, magenta bleeding into violet, then an electric cyan. The light washes strangely over her bare feet as she pads to the bathroom, licking weirdly over tendon and bone.

She catches her ankle on a corner, and it hurts enough that Cam thinks _I’m awake._

_I’m awake_.

So she plugs into the Net, because anything is better than sleeping, and there’s no reason not to.

Her mirror lights up softly as it connects, jacked into her wrist, quietly humming. It shows her the weather (raining). Suggested routes to bypass traffic. An Ad. A bill. An Ad. An Op-Ed by A. Pent on the Radical Heuristics of Netspace and Future of Therapeutic VR, which is not precisely an Ad, but so obviously targeted it might as well be. An Ad. An Ad. An Ad.

Palamedes’ face swims into view behind her shoulder, raw-boned and gauntly insomniac, grey shadows under his grey eyes under his silver glasses, which are crooked on his nose.

“I realize how this sounds, coming from me,” he murmurs, “but shouldn’t you be asleep?”

Cam snorts, flicking away another ad.

“You’re right,” she drawls, “it does sound ridiculous coming from you.”

He huffs, folding his arms. It’s—he was always like that, making the gesture because it seemed like an important thing to do, even if he had no intention of stopping you, or even talking you out of it. A man whose pockets were always full of stim tabs and painkillers. Cam rummages in her medicine cabinet, and for a moment, he’s gone, invisible behind her as the mirror swings out of angle, and then back again, as she closes the cabinet, ripping at a tamper-proof seal with her teeth. He straightens his glasses.

“In my capacity as your tech, obviously, it’s none of my business, except to say that you might want to keep an eye on how many of those you’re taking, because the changes to your hormone levels and your electrolyte balance could affect the function of your augments. It’s a slim possibility, but it’s there. In my capacity as your friend…”

The stim dissolves under her tongue, flatly, chemically sweet.

“You look tired.” he says.

The line out from her wrist Node glitters, spidery and incandescent. Cam braces herself on the edge of the sink, pulling away until it goes taught, fiberglass stretched to the point of breaking—but it won’t, because they don’t make them that way. She plucks at it, and it seems like it should make a noise, like a harp string, like _something_ , but it doesn’t, and Cam raises her eyes back to the reflection of Palamedes’ face in the mirror, and says:

“You look dead.”

He snorts. His profile is a thin, hard-angled thing, all cheekbones. The geometry of it is unstable.

“Well,” he replies, “that hasn’t changed, has it?”

He says, in the soft, faintly rasping tone that indicates from him the absolute extremity of heartfelt sincerity:

“Cam. Be careful.”

He says:

“I know you don’t need me to tell you, just—”

He says nothing, because Palamedes Sextus has been dead for six years, and she isn’t, standing, shifting from foot to foot in her shitty apartment, crushed up against a bank of gleaming ad-screen, silently unplugging her wrist Node, and turning off her mirror.

She is alone.

* * *

**III. land wherein thou art a stranger**

_You don’t Log On alone._

_You don’t go In without somebody there to pull you out._

_You don’t leave anyone behind._

Project Canaan died six years ago, and Palamedes Sextus died with it, and hasn’t stopped talking to her since.

Cam tells herself that ghosts aren’t real, and if they were, he wouldn’t be one of them. It’s just an echo. It’s just algorithmic modeling, a data-footprint spitting back things he was statistically likely to have said. It’s just her earpiece malfunctioning. It’s just that he installed every one of her mods; there must have been something left behind.

It’s just that she can still hear him offline, off every grid, without any signal at all.

* * *

**IV. blackbody radiation**

The car cuts her off at the mouth of the alley like it’s an argument she’s losing.

It is a Serious Business car, a car like a cocktail dress, low-slung and sleek, a mean, predatory sprawl of a car, a capital-c Car with a backseat like a killing field and a body like a shark.

It is so ludicrously, overwhelmingly, calculatingly intimidating that the Trident-and-Chain-Net emblem glittering on the grille is honestly just overkill, about as subtle as being shot.

That’s IdaSec for you.

Cam sighs.

Her helmet’s UI _blips_ urgently, redly indicating that dismounting her bike now, without first scanning her cargo at its intended destination will be considered a breach of contract, per Sec. 1.1.18 of the standing agreement designated and notarized by the legal representative arm of White Glass Incorporated, signed Apr. 23rd, per the agreement, a courier must…

She blinks the notification away. Yanks her helmet off and carefully props it over the handlebars, and prays it’s still there when she has to claw it back out of impound.

The man inside the car does not tell her to get in, because he doesn’t need to. He just smiles as the window rolls down, the kind of thin, curving smile that makes people say you have a cruel mouth, which is a thing that has been said about Naberius Tern. His lips are glossily bio-luminescent, a rippling shimmer that flashes over his perfect, abhorrent cupid’s-bow mouth. A delicate scroll of neon modwork tracks up his cheekbones.

Cam curls her hand over the window frame, just hard enough to dent the steel.

“Can I trust that IdaSec is prepared to buy me out of any outstanding contracts?”

“Already been done,” Tern sniffs airily.

“And to cover the cost of getting my back bike back.”

“...Of course.”

It’s real leather inside, _real_ -real, not vat-grown, not plastic, real leather the colour of persimmon. The scent of it is almost suffocating.

“I told her,” Tern drawls, “not to do this, but nobody listens to _me_.”

His hand glitters; more modwork, thumb and the first two fingers of his hand stretched into gleaming claws, bright gold seeding somewhere behind his knuckles, and terminating a full inch out from his fingertips, the kind of point so sharp it barely even hurts.

But he’s probably got them wired up to hurt anyway. That’s IdaSec for you.

He drums them against the hollow of his throat, settling back into the seats, flicking his tongue out against his anglerfish lips.

“Still, while I’ve got you, I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me pick your brain about those combat mods? Never met a real Grey Warden before.”

Would’ve worked better on _the_ Warden, Cam thinks. Tern would’ve been his type.

“No.” she says flatly.

Tern huffs—not a laugh, not quite a sneer.

“Shame,” he drawls, and then:

“ _God_. I wish she’d fucking listen. Nothing’s gonna come of it. Waste of my time.”

* * *

**V. red right hand**

Once upon a time, there was a princess, and she was, being a princess, the most beautiful in all the land, and her kingdom, and all of its subsidiary holdings and acquisitions, were accounted as the finest in the world, and its people and majority shareholders prospered.

The princess, until six years ago, was never seen without the company of her sister, and on the day they parted, the princess’s sister leaving their happy kingdom to study in foreign lands, it rained for hours, and the stock price of Ida Security Holdings & Co. wavered briefly, but did not change very much at all.

“Thank you _so_ much for coming,” says the Princess of IdaSec. There is a plum-coloured suit wrapped around her like a chokehold, glossy like blood on concrete. She squeezes Cam’s hands and smiles so warmly you could almost make yourself believe that obeying her was a choice. She gestures, gold nails flashing.

“Please, make yourself comfortable.”

Cam does not. She perches on the edge of the sofa, one eye on the door.

They are:

Breathlessly high up, teetering above the city at a vertiginous, ludicrous height, and all the windows reach floor-to-ceiling, because IdaSec does _not_ do subtle. Tern frames the window like it’s all he was born to do, propped on one hip and his clawed hand.

And Coronbeth Tridentarius, the Princess of Ida, is:

Breathlessly lovely, the way that a train wreck is lovely, like people have been telling her so her entire life and she finds the whole thing incredibly boring by now, eyelashes as long as Tern’s claws are, swept low and lazy over her cheekbones, neck long and perfect and swan-white. Company assets propped up inside her suit with real silk, and anybody can look good, mod themselves up any old way, but Coronabeth looks _real_. She looks like she’s looking directly at Cam when she talks, _really_ looking, instead of calling clients or fucking Cleopatra or saving Neo-Mars from Marie Antionette’s revenant army with her VR mod in the background. She looks like Cam has the whole entirety of her attention, which is more effective than any amount of leg could ever be.

Still, she leans against the edge of her desk in a way that makes her skirt ride up her thighs, almost like she's hedging the bet anway. Overkill. That’s IdaSec.

“I’d like to talk to you about Project Canaan,” she purrs.

Cam doesn’t miss a beat. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t need to—and thank God for _that_ one, even if it was the most excruciating augment to have done.

“I’m not familiar,” she replies, and deep in her stomach, something _clenches_ , getting ready to run.

_You don’t Log On alone._

_You don’t go In without somebody there to pull you out._

_You don’t leave anyone behind._

“I was so hoping we could skip this part,” Corona sighs, drumming at the hinge of her jaw. “I’m prepared to be very generous. I’m also prepared to have you fucking erased.” The fricative catches on her mouth, the edges of her teeth lingering just a little too long against her lip.

“Which,” she continues, “you know I could do.”

She could.

Cam inhales. She leans forward across her knees, slipping herself like a knife into Coronabeth’s orbit.

“May I be candid with you?” she says.

“I would like that,” the other woman hums. “Babs?”

“Of course, doll,” Tern drawls, rolling up off the windowsill. He flares his nostrils with unmasked, unamused disdain as he saunters past Cam to the door.

“If you know about Project Canaan, then you know it was a failure. Scrapped.”

Corona’s eyes get big in her face, blooming like bruises.

“Actually,” she croons, “it wasn’t. The project was never actually taken off the books, and IdaSec maintains a controlling interest. Enough to, hypothetically,” and she inspects her flawless cuticles, every word dropping from her mouth with a lush relish, “reinstate a former member, at their last known level of clearance.”

“That would burn every share you had left,” Cam says bluntly. “What’s your interest?”

“Personal.”

Of-fucking-course it is.

Camilla Hect makes of herself a hole, a dark space to pour a secret into, dark eyes soft and waiting, dark hair falling in front of them to say she is discreet, she will know only what you want her to. She won’t ask. She won’t tell. She promises.

“A Grey Warden,” Corona purrs, “and a former Alexandrite. The military pension alone should be enough to keep you living comfortably, but here you are,” and she cups her elbow in her palm, finger tucked delicately against her pulse, pacing closer, “running courier delivery. Whatever it is you’re wasting it on, and I won’t ask, but I can help you with it. Carte blanche.”

“Why.”

“Because they’re still in there. Palamedes. That Septimus girl.”

There is a long, awful pause. Corona doesn’t look at her, or anywhere, her gaze gone misty and distant.

“My sister.”

* * *

**VI. trentham**

Tern catches her by the arm as Cam is _bolting_ , already shuffling her savings into as many accounts as she can manage, already selling the bike, already cross-referencing extradition laws. The display from her NodeLink stutters as she whirls to face him. His claws dig into the meat of her bicep.

“Say no,” he hisses, “You’d be the first one in her whole life, but say no. Don’t let her do this. Say no, Hect, because she doesn’t listen to me.”

Cam wrenches her arm away.

Don’t have to tell her twice.

It’s insane.

Project Canaan died six years ago, and they all died with it, and Cam knows this. It’s just that there is something wrong with her, or her mods, because the readout overlaying her left-eyed view of the lobby no longer shows the extradition agreements between the City and Trentham, it says:

_You don’t Log On alone._

_You don’t go In without somebody there to pull you out._

_You don’t leave anyone behind._

* * *

**VII. silently and very fast**

This part never happened.

This part never happened—they slept together, one bed, every night, with his arm flung out across the space between them, wrist crooked to tuck the back of his hand along the hollow of her spine, knuckles pushed up to vertebrae—but they never _slept together_. Cam knows that. Maybe it would’ve changed something, if they had, but, she thinks, probably not.

She is in her bed, Logged On by the Node tucked between her occipital lobe and her C1 vertebra.

Almost nobody has skullware anymore, it’s too involved, it’s too close. The surgery alone—it’s too easy to get yourself confused, linked so close to your brain. How would you tell what was real anymore?

But this, Cam knows, this never happened.

Palamedes was never above her, like he is above her now, rangy and warm, his face tucked into the hollow of her neck, mouthing at her pulse.

He never really believed anything was real unless he could touch it, even in Netspace. He had extra Nodes put in at his wrists and his hands to compensate.

He pushes himself up very slowly, pupils blown enormous and black, swallowing his eyes, and splays his hands around her waist, thumbs pointed towards ner navel, stroking back and forth.

He always had beautiful hands; long-fingered, fine-boned, a stark geometry of tendons and angles.

Palamedes digs his fingers into the solid flesh of her hips, and his hands are long enough that if he stretches, which he does, he can trace the curve of her breast with the edge of his thumbnail, and the feeling is barely there, and because it is barely there, it’s somehow _more_. Cam pushes up into it, lip caught between her teeth.

This never happened.

He drags his palms over her hip bones with a greedy reverence, and for a moment, he does not move except to sift his fingertips through the hair on her thighs, as if the coarseness of it is the single-most fascinating thing he has ever encountered. He looks at her like she is the single-most fascinating thing he has ever encountered.

“Were you going to move?” Cam murmurs, rolling her eyes.

“Mmm.” He slips down, nuzzles against her knee, eyes fluttering shut. “Eventually.”

Palamedes huffs a chagrined little laugh into the inside of her thigh, and Cam jerks, ticklish, and nearly kicks him in the head.

This never happened.

He’s so _light_. It takes almost nothing to flip them over, and the _noise_ he makes when Cam bites him is—

He whines, clutching at her hair, pushing her teeth into his neck, hips stuttering up into hers while Cam sucks bruise after bruise into his bird-boned chest, not riding him, not really, just dragging the wet seam of her cunt against the hard ridge of his cock. She is wetter than she can ever remember being.

This never happened.

“You’re dead,” she whispers, sometime after, crushing her cheek against his hand. “You’re dead, or you’re a copy, but you’re not real.”

“I don’t know,” he whispers back. “I don’t know if there’s a difference between—between a thing, and a good enough copy. I don’t—know if that’s something I would’ve said. That I didn’t know something.”

Cams snorts, and shakes her head.

“Only to me.”

_You don’t leave anyone behind._

She unplugs her skullware. The space it leaves is an empty, clenching, post-coital ache, the same feeling of something _missing_ after being full of something else.

Cam draws the sheets around her waist, pulling up IdaSec’s private line.

She takes the job.

**VIII. tethered**

“Can he pull me out, if it comes to that?”

IdaSec head office, breathlessly high-up. There’s Cam, rocking on and off the balls of her feet, augments whirring softly in her joints, knuckles pushed into the desk. There’s Babs, in the opposite corner, swiping insouciantly at a datapad with the tip of one claw. Corona, reclined in an office chair ten acres wide, idly fluffing her hair.

“Babs?” Corona laughs, a frothy, champagne-y laugh. “No, Babs is terrible in Netspace. Makes him sick. No,” she purrs, reaching forward and closing her hand over Camilla’s, “No, you’ll be working directly with me.”

A single Node, gold-plated, winks at the inside of her wrist.

* * *

**IX. there is no person without a world**

There is nothing on Ida, nothing in the city still offline, except for 598 square feet in the basement of an old warehouse, gutted down to the brick. The room, in actuality, measures 620 square feet, exterior walls included. There is a 12 foot by 10 ten foot space crushed up against the western-most wall which contains:

One mattress, one respirator, and the last known NodeLink terminal remaining of Project Canaan.

Corona, when she sees it, smiles slowly, tracing her lip with one fingertip.

“So _that’s_ where the pension goes.”

Coronabeth Tridentarius is—strange.

She fumbles her uplinks, jacking in cables with the nervy hesitance of a child, barely able to Log On unaided, but in Netspace…

Corona’s body is taller in Netspace than it is in the flesh, impossibly tall, all gold-veined marble and saw-edged feathers, and she moves through it like she was born there. Huge clots of ocean swirl around her head, fat purple lionfish flicking in and out of her floating hair, their spines licking at her jaw.

Honestly, it’s more creative than Cam gave her credit for.

_Very Coleridge_ , says something in Cam’s auditory uplink, which she studiously ignores, the way she has been for six years, because hearing ghosts is one thing, and talking back is another.

Unless they _are_ alive, the way Corona says they are, in which case…

Cam shakes her head while Palamedes, or his ghost, or his copy, adds _I wouldn't have pegged her for the type._

Corona says they’re alive. Says she can find them.

Cam tongues at her molars, and something in her throat chews up the sub-vocal contractions of muscle and spits out a burst of static back across the uplink line as she thinks _Usually the other way around with you, wasn’t it?_

Something in her auditory uplink snorts.

Palamedes in Netspace used to give himself extra hands, clicking orreries of finger bones around his face. Extra eyes.

Cam’s Avatar looks exactly like herself, so as not to give anything away.

She can see, with absolute clarity, the light rippling off Corona’s pearl-and-onyx fingernails as she rakes through the blood-colored dirt, and then, just for a split second, Cam can see two of her, two faces, four hands, two shadows—

Then she cuts the Nodelink, and everything goes dark. A lone lionfish flops pathetically before winking out of existence.

Coronabeth Tridentarius pushes up on her elbows, still jacked in at one wrist, and both collar-Nodes, sweeping her radiant cloud of hair from her face, laughing like the impulse to fling yourself from a high place.

“I didn’t know you worried,” she croons meanly, “You don’t need to. I assure you I’m perfectly capable.”

Cam fixes her with a long, black look.

“I assure you,” she replies, clipped, “you aren’t. _You don’t g—_

Corona laughs again, delicately unplugging herself, stretching both arms languidly over her head.

“‘You don’t go in alone’. I’m aware. You do know that nobody _really_ listens to that, don’t you?”

She tucks her face into her shoulder, humming. _Pops_ her joints, sinks back down into the threadbare mattress, legs flung out wide, propped on one elbow, staring at Cam over the heavy swell of her chest while she arranges her hair again. There is blood on her arm, a bright thread tracing the rim of the Node at her elbow.

“Don’t you ever have _fun?_ ” she says, gesturing.

Blood.

Cam frowns, and catches her hand, dragging her arm closer. Corona’s skin is very soft, and very hot, and almost shockingly un-modded, no augments at all beyond the Node winking in the crook of her arm.

“They surgically remove the impulse when you enlist,” Cam murmurs flatly, pressing experimentally on the Node with the pad of her thumb, “Fewer distractions that way.”

Blood beads up around the edges of the implant. Above her, Cam can hear Coronabeth’s breath catch softly.

“Who did these?”

Corona snatches her arm back, cradling her wrist to her chest.

“Confidential, I’m afraid,” she says lightly. Her eyes are the color of bruises, geode-hard. “I’m sure you understand.”

* * *

**X. future soon**

“At a guess,” Palamedes says, “I’d say she has ARS.”

“Why would Coronabeth Tridentarius have augment rejection syndrome.”

He frowns.

“Why does anybody. But she doesn’t have any mods other than the Nodes— can’t imagine how she’s running the company without them. It’s almost impossible to get anything done without being Networked in, the information just doesn’t move fast enough. Her sister must have taken care of that half of things, before. I wonder who’s doing it now. ”

Like this, Cam could almost be talking to herself.

She is only talking to herself.

* * *

**XI. I imagine the gods saying, We will make it up to you**

“I had them!” Coronabeth snarls, mouth bright and furious. “I could _see_ —I had them! Why the fuck did you pull me out!?”

“You were seizing.”

“I was—“

“Dying.” Cam bites out. She seizes Corona by the elbow, grinding the implant there hard against the bone. “These things, they plug into your nervous system, directly. _Yours_ is trying to force them out. And even if it wasn’t, you’d been under so long that your brain was starting to cook. You are not—”

_Not going to die like he did._

Cam grits her teeth, and reaches into the part of herself where the memory lives. And Cam turns that part off. She was always good at that part, reaching in and turning things off.

Just not good enough.

She exhales.

“I don’t know what it is that makes you think you can find them. I don’t know what it is you’re looking for. But I don’t question your methods. Do me the courtesy of not questioning mine.”

She draws her hand away.

Corona swallows, rubbing at her elbow.

“He was looking for her, wasn’t he. That Septimus girl. He was looking for her when he died.”

Camilla sighs heavily, looping a line of cable over and over itself in her hand. She looks at Coronabeth. Looks away.

“Go get some sleep.” She murmurs, “You look tired.”

* * *

**XII. a green hour i can’t stop**

Warehouse interior. Night. Wet brick, cicada-buzz of the fluorescents, everything gone a little green. Two women sit on a threadbare mattress, drinking.

They’ve been at it for weeks; Coronabeth links in, tethered for safety, Cam stands by on the other side to pull her out. They’ve found nothing.

Coronabeth rubs at her wrist, smearing blood across her palm.

“I always hated being alone. The _noise_ of being alone. But I wanted to be. People are always so fucking strange about twins—you’re part of a _set_ , whether you want to be or not. It was Ianthe’s idea to get IdaSec involved with the project. ‘The absolute limits of Net integration’—whatever the fuck it was. She was mad for it. I encouraged her.”

Corona closes her eyes, chin tipped up.

“When I first started hearing her, after, I thought I must have been going insane.”

Her eyes snap open again, gleaming, almost manic.

“It’s my birthday,” she announces suddenly, tracing the rim of her glass. “We should celebrate.”

Coronabeth Tridentarius stretches her arm out with an easy, leonine grace, and drapes her wrist over Cam’s shoulder.

In a better, kinder world, where they aren’t the people they are, Cam would kiss the lump of joint there, and the teenaged CEO of the Grey Wardens never would have followed his childhood best friend into the military, and Cam would smooth her hands up Corona’s arms, and Project Canaan would never have existed, and Cam would palm at Corona’s golden, unmarked, unmodded skin, the slick hollow of her collarbones, shiny with sweat, and they would sleep in the next morning, and get breakfast, and sit in parks, and neither of them would be full of screaming ghosts. But they _are_ the people they are.

She digs her thumb into Corona’s wrist Node instead. Corona gasps softly, thighs pressed together.

Warehouse interior. Night. The light is very ugly, and the air is very cold, and Coronabeth Tridentarius has her shirt shoved up to her collarbones, the substantial corporate assets of Ida Security Holdings on full display, nipples pebbling against the chill.

Cam pants, mouthing gracelessly at the inside of Corona’s hip, and wherever she can reach, she digs in _hard_ against the Nodes on either side of Corona’s spine, just to make her squirm and buck, knees wobbling where they’re planted on either side of Cam’s neck.

Palemedes was lean to the point of austerity. Corona is…plush, is soft, is an obscene extravagance, soft rolls overspilling her palm when Cam grabs at her hips, Corona is leaning back away from Cam, to spill her drink over her tits. Cam stares at the track it leaves, alcohol slipping down her stomach to Cam’s mouth. Corona looks back at her, heavy-lidded and hot.

Sometimes Corona’s eyes don’t match her face.

It’s all too tight and too awkward, catching on the edges of each other, and Corona is _soaked_ , impossibly slick against her mouth, and Cam can feel—imagines she feels sparks, every time Cam pushes on her Nodes, and Corona whimpers, like there’s some conductivity, somewhere, filling her bones up with static, making her grind down against her face—and it’s an absurd thought, and she wants to laugh, but.

But she doesn’t, and just works her tongue into the slick, soft heat above her, and laps at Corona’s clit until she all but screams, hawk-high and feral, head thrown back.

“They’re alive,” Corona whispers into her hair, sometime after. “They are. She wouldn’t leave me alone.”

* * *

**XIII. memory is another name for ghosts**

They’re in too deep.

It shouldn’t even be _them_ in too deep, because Cam should still be holding the tether, but Corona had started seizing, and Cam dove in to pull her out, but—

Something’s wrong.

It’s not any landscape she recognizes, half-formed and worm-eaten, glitching and stuttering in Netspace.

They’re at a funeral.

There was no funeral.

Cam squeezes Corona’s hand in her own, and looks down into the grave.

**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on twitter @gin_n_cthonic, or discord @ devilinwhite#6241


End file.
